Melan

Another one: attempting to turn a bevel patch into an inverted bevel endcap, the textures on the sides are distorted (pulled towards the endcap corner?). How do I remedy this? Copying/pasting shaders, Normalise and Natural did not help.

Patch meshes: can I split them with the clipper tool? It does not look that way, but if I could (e.g. into a triangle), it would be pretty cool.

I have been thinking of this possibility ever since I saw Komag's recreation of a small Scottish keep. Imagine something like that looming in a mission background. Dromed2 had its object buildings, but they were mostly boxes with a window and roof texture - sometimes nice to save polys and increase level depth, but not quite as much as could be done with prefabs, which seem to have the virtues of multibrushes without their problems. I will contribute if I have stuff that can't fit into a FM, but may be useful to others.

The snow in the first screens is very clever. How did you do those bumps?

Thanks!

A short question - when I am placing entities (such as a cup that can be thrown around), how can I remove the green "collide" wrap that sometimes surrounds them? It makes it hard to see how objects look properly in-game.

Not to belabour a topic that is slowly but surely getting tired, but Dromed did not just feature subtractive geometry. It featured subtractive and additive geometry, and let you pick whichever was convenient. That's a big difference. Sure, you started out entirely in solid space, but you could just make a few large air brushes and build the rest with solids (actually, that's how the second mission in Calendra's Legacy was made; I replicated this method in Prowler of the Dark, a mission much less ambitious, and some sections of Disorientation). In theory, you could even omit subtraction entirely if you had enough brushes and polycount to spare; on all but really antiquated PCs, there are no significant performance differences. What there is, is that it is way easier to get too many polygons in view this way; constructing your stuff in tunnels is inherently safer. There are a lot of things iffy with Dromed, but this isn't one of them.

Érhetnek még meglepetések. I am also curious about this. Rotate/scale does not allow me to do it.

Stardog: we recently discussed this issue in the newbie questions thread, starting with my post at #145. You may find that discussion usable, it cleared up a few things for me.

I am curious how you did the curving walls. Are they made of patches, or did you cut up a cylindrical prism? [edit]Also, did you build the entire front space in a big skybox? I assume so, but please share. Especially the height in units, I am still trying to visualise how much is proper.

Pretty much. Although frobber's cathedral also had the extra fun of creeping around on the edges of the exterior while buffeted by the wind.

Truly, DarkRadiant is full of wonders. That goes right in the "should know" folder.

An odd error: dmapping my map (t002.map), TDM reported a leak. However, when I try to generate a pointfile, an error message pops up: Now what? [edit]Incorrectly appended material file, that's what. Works all right now, although the textures I added with the tutorial's normal mapping directions... don't.[/edit]

That looks pretty good there. As long as patches can do most of the detail work I need, it is fine. Learning advanced modelling is just outside my possibilities with my current workload, and will probably stay that way even after I get my PhD (next month if things go well). Were the gothic windowframes in the training mission created using patches or models?

Now that's going some places. Are you saying this is the mission that took "2 months of on and off work"?

Very impressive. Multibrush-entities that don't suck. (I found this stuff when I was trying to take apart bits of the training mission, but couldn't make heads nor tails of it. Fascinating!)

Mortem Desino: you made it out of patches, correct? I can see the sides with slightly misaligned textures. I have been experimenting with merge, and it can reduce some of the miniature brushes that have been generated, although you are correct that it is still a lot in comparison: Fidcal: if I weren't ambitious, I would never have released Bad Debts as my first mission. And as I wrote, there is a lot of impressive stuff here. Normalmaps alone lend a depths to levels previously unimagined, and patches look quite powerful.

Make no mistake, I have a high opinion on the editor and see a lot of possibilities in it. Just keep in mind that my questions are not related to specific architectural features, rather building principles. Now, CSG substract looks very useful, something that might be used for roughly the same operation as an air brush. I have also seen its splintering effects on nearby geometry and will keep that in mind - although if I understand correctly, the engine can handle a zillion more polys in view than Dark? (Doom 3 had a lot of high poly areas that ran seamlessly on my deceased desk PC with very high settings.) [edit]Here is a rough TDM implementation of the gothic window. It is doable, but a) holy crap that's a lot of brushes (some can be merged, although the ) it would not be easy to adjust minor details c) obvious, although avoidable Z-fighting where the substracted area touches the wall Still, not bad. This may be the beginning of a beauuutiful friendship.[/edit]

Komag: even if an ultimately futile exercise, that's very impressive! Maps of that size, with more detail, would be the ultimate rooftop daydream.

Here are some questions, some of which I have asked before but embarrasingly still don't understand the answer for. Looking at the tutorial, I see how I can build some basic stuff (including a lot of possibilities with patches), but I am missing how I can add some features which could be easily made out of air brushes in Dromed, or how to do it efficiently. Here are four basic arhictectural dilemmas that mystify me even after reading the tutorial: 1. I understand that TDM works exclusively with additive geometry, meaning everything is made of solid stuff. Therefore, to make an opening in a wall, you either have to a) copy the entire wall brush, open it up, and construct a protruding box to keep out the void (probably with Make Room to keep it easy); use the clipper tool to cut the wall into pieces, say, this way, with the patterned area deleted afterwards: From the two methods, seems to be easier, and would be useful in most situations. Still, I find the entire thing a bit wasteful - you have to add and move a lot of brushes to get what would be all of two operations (air+air) in Dromed. I guess what I am interested in is if it can be done more easily via a command I missed, or at least some trick to speed up the process. 2. It becomes more complicated once we get to the second exercise: a circular hole in the wall! The logical thing in Dromed would be to punch it out with a cylinder... not very circular but good for our purpose. In TDM, I first imagined it by creating a 24-sided prism, pushing it into the wall and hitting Make Room, which would yield a pipe-like thing with two "lids" you might remove. Unfortunately, this doesn't work, since the original wall is still blocking our "pipe", since brushes don't merge into each other; moreover, Make Room splinters my nice 24-sided prism into a lot of fragments that would be a terror to manipulate after creating it. Therefore, the only way I can currently envision is to construct a rectangular opening, and create the pipe walls with four patches in the corners: Beyond being work-intensive, it may be a problem if we want the "pipe" to protrude a bit - patches can apparently be thickened, but I'd just like a clean circle-in-a-circle, which would - maybe - only work with returning to the first method and building the protrusion separately (potentially messing up the patch-brush connection). That's... not intuitive. 3. The third issue is where I am totally lost. Say if I'd like something complex, like the gothic window I did for Unbidden Guest, which looks like this: In Dromed, the window is made from five cylinders: a solid for the protruding base, and four overlapping airs for the opening. In TDM, it is ... made from ... what? Models? It baffles me. 4. Overlapping brushes. Let's imagine we are constructing a facade, and I wish to add something to the front whose flace is in plane with the facade, but protrudes above (like the brick decorations on old houses, as reproduced below, but this actually may not be the best example). How do I do this the easiest without Z-fightin? I can think of some method, but none intuitive. How would you experienced TDM editors do it? (Preferably without modelling; I really really don't want to learn another complex programme right now, and with IRL work, it would be hopeless anyway.) IN SUMMARY, I guess I am still in a Dromed frame of mind, and might be missing the obvious - although it is also possible some things are just not done easily in TDM. Hopefully though, there are some useful workarounds that can be employed without much headache, and I don't have to say fairly basic architecture is easier done in a decade-old editor.

Well, dragging a heavy body into a good hiding spot in a short time is pretty hard to do IRL. Not that I would know anything about that or anything.

I got similar error messages from multiple mirrors, but in all cases, this was due to an erratic mobilenet connection. When service was steady, the files were downloaded correctly, and IIRC no problems surfaced with Fidcal's site. I am pretty sure Sogi-Ya had a connection problem.

I also noticed that corner. Simple but beautiful!

VelvetFistIronGlove:

My impression as well. It is actually a very simple level, and could easily be done in Dromed (with less eye candy), but it just works. The interconnectedness was a nice surprise, although I spent a lot of time vainly looking through the rafters to find something hidden. No luck!